Hip hop identity in a township reality. - Poppunt

instruction in the mother tongue was extended up to the highest possible level for
black children, while the role of Afrikaans increased. At the same time the
government gradually eliminated mother tongue English teachers out of the system
in an attempt to deny black children access to English mother tongue speakers.
This strategy did work effectively and resulted in a very limited contact between
black children and native English speakers. Finally this resulted in the development
of certain characteristic patterns of pronunciation and syntax, both traceable to the
mother tongue, which are now seen as the norms of (spoken) BSAE (de Klerk and
Gough: 357). The ultimate goal of this policy fitted the overall idea of apartheid
completely. The diversity between people is stressed if everybody is educated in
their own mother tongue. This was the idea behind the education and language
policies, but looking at the spread of BSAE throughout the whole country amongst
the ethnically African population of South Africa, it becomes clear this idea did not
have the expected results. When in 1979 pupils were allowed to choose their own
medium of instruction, after the first four years of school, the overwhelming
majority chose English (de Klerk and Gough: 357). A major reason for this choice
was the idea that English was a means for societal and socio-economic
improvement, while the indigenous languages were not valued as such by its own
speakers, since those languages did not facilitate an upward social mobility in
society. Still, a lot of pupils have little exposure to mother tongue speakers of
English and varieties of English other than BSAE. All of this has resulted in very
mixed levels of competence in English and therefore it is difficult to make
estimations of how many South African black people have a knowledge of English.
Estimations on this vary between 32 percent and 61 percent (de Klerk and Gough:
358). It is hard to define what exactly is ‘knowledge of English’. This is a
continuum, with huge differences between the competence in English of the South
African blacks.
For the description of the general and most common features of BSAE, we will use
several studies that have outlined a number of features. Due to the fact that there
is still a big need for more research in this field, there is not really a consensus on
what exactly the main features of BSAE are. Therefore we have made a summary of
all the features we could find and that often return. We have used examples from
our own interviews to make the features more clear. We will restrict ourselves to
features that occur rather frequently in the speech of our interviewees. Some
authors recognise certain features, while others do not, and sometimes they do not
occur frequently in our interviewees’ speech. The latter might be due to the fact that